‘They are our brothers and sisters’

René Bruemmer , The Gazette02.03.2010

A cross draped with black ribbons looks onto the site of a mass grave for victims of a 7-magnitude earthquake that rocked Haiti on Jan. 12, killing 150,000 to 200,000 people. Several trenches remain open waiting for those uncovered during demolition and brought to the site on a dry rolling hill side in the Savanne de boeuf region just outside Port-au-Prince.Allen McInnis
/ Montreal Gazette

A man covers his face as he walks past a leveled building on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Feb. 2 2010.Allen McInnis
/ Montreal Gazette

Eighteen people who died when the roof of the main cathedral in Port-au-Prince collapsed during the Jan. 12 earthquake were buried together in a mass grave behind the church.Allen McInnis
/ Montreal Gazette

A man picks through the garbage on the bed of an open sewer in Port-au-Prince, Feb. 2, 2010. Many Haitians do not have enough food or clean water after a 7-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti Jan. 12, damaging much of Port-au-Prince leaving more than 150,000 dead.Allen McInnis
/ Montreal Gazette

A basic white cross marks one of the mass grave sites for victims of a magnitude-7 earthquake that rocked Haiti on Jan. 12, killing between 150,000 and 200,000 people. Several trenches remain open waiting for those uncovered during demolition and brought to the site on a dry rolling hill side in the Savanne Boeuf region just outside of Port-au-Prince.Allen McInnis
/ The Gazette

PORT-AU-PRINCE – In the slowly reviving streets of the shattered Haitian capital, it is strangely easy to forget the overwhelming tragedy that occurred here only three weeks ago.

The backdrop of collapsed buildings and houses becomes familiar over time, a uniform grey mass of concrete and steel fading in behind a foreground of trucks, cars and motorcycles whizzing to and fro, pedestrians in well-laundered shirts making their way past the ubiquitous street vendors selling their wares and services. One can get used to anything, it seems, even devastation all around.

The cleaning brigades working for $3 to $5 a day remove the rubble one shovel, bucket and wheelbarrow load at a time. The cloying, sickly sweet smell of rotting humans comes only occasionally now, wafted by a strong wind from their temporary graves of rubble.

In the low hills north of Port-au-Prince, where the ground of dirt and sand and rock is too arid for all but the most tenacious of spindly plants to survive in this harsh land, are the mass graves of the dead. It is a place called Savanne de boeuf, which translates roughly as Plain of the Cows.

Early estimates put the number of bodies dumped there at 80,000, almost the population of Sherbrooke. The earthquake is believed to have killed at least 150,000.

They are anonymous cemeteries of sand and stone, four or six or eight football fields wide, the absence of scrub brush often the sole hint they exist.

In one, four squat metal crosses on mounds criss-crossed by the tracks of heavy machinery are the only markings to note the presence of the remains of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who had to be quickly removed to avert disease when the walls and ceilings and roofs came down upon them. Large mounds of earth removed to make the holes piled nearby mirror the mountains of bodies interred below. A mass service scheduled for Tuesday appears to have been cancelled – the sites are too far out of town for most Haitians to get to.

It is yet another post-earthquake indignity to add to a long list in a culture that places great stock in the interment of their dead. Haitians generally try to bury their loved ones in family sites or crypts, so their spirits will have the company of those who went before and those that will come after.

At the Port-au-Prince cemetery, many of the cement above-ground graves marked with names like “Famille Yaenne” or “Famille Julienne” have cracked or toppled, spilling their contents of skulls and bones and dirt-browned suits and dresses to the ground.

A family buries its 84-year-old grandfather, who survived three days stuck in the rubble, then five days aboard a U.S. navy hospital ship offshore, but finally couldn’t take it anymore. Their grandmother died in the quake. Workers smash the entranceway to the crypt because the coffin is too big to fit in, and haggle with the family for more money for the extra work.

At the entrance to the cemetery, a hand-lettered sign reads “All is full. We can’t take any more bodies.”

At the mass graves there is almost no one, and no sound but the buzzing of flies and the wind blowing down off the hills toward the turquoise sea, Port-au-Prince hazy in the distance.

Bétide Louisé, a 28-year-old mother of four, and her husband stroll through at 10 a.m. on their way to market near Port-au-Prince to sell the sack of peas she carries on her head. They’re coming from a town a five-hour walk away. They’ll go back in the afternoon, a trip they make every day or two. She’ll make about $3, she says.

A couple of cowboys riding donkeys guides a herd of about 30 cows and calves through the clearing, the cattle defecating and urinating on the graves. The herders wave and smile to a journalist taking their picture, a typical reaction here in a land of kindly people.

More holes to dig

Haiti has the ability to warm your heart – and break it at the same time.

Nirva Yllis, 36, a heavy machinery operator with Port-au-Prince’s Public Works Department, used to work on road-construction contracts. Now, workers transport bodies from dump trucks into the bucket of her front-end loader so she can dump them into the five-metre trenches that line the outskirts of the site.

Before she had a lot of bodies to move, but the pace has slowed of late. Tuesday, 10 came in from the remains of the National Education building.

“I felt bad at first putting the bodies in the ground,” she said, a round-faced woman in a bright yellow T-shirt with a Batman logo. “You have the same blood of that person. They are our brothers and sisters.”

But without her, people would not be able to drive by on the main road that skirts the turquoise sea, because of the stench.

She climbs the ladder and starts her massive dusty yellow machine, steel track treads digging into the dirt of the mass graves beneath.

There are more holes to dig.

rbruemmer@thegazette.canwest.com

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